U.S. Preparing A Military Crack Down On What’s Left Of Democratic Rights
Workers and oppressed fightback must prepare and organize against the rise of fascism!
(Image: liampayne/Instagram)
The public lynching of George Floyd, coming when it did, functions as an inadvertent yet clear incitement by the MAGA crowd to exploit the resulting inter-racial “red/black’ youth revolt. The ruling class, never missing an opportunity to spin the story from racist police murder to what it terms “illegitimate forms of protest”, in turn uses this characterization to justify Trump’s opportunistic imposition of emergency powers–sending in the National Guard. Trump personally wants these powers because he can’t get elected without a crack down or lock up that keeps the masses from voting.
Chauvin, is a product of instituionalized racism; this known killer with MAGA and Klan connections,executed a public lynching provoking a nation-wide protest as if it were a plan from Trump’s playbook. The local “red/black” police squads followed as per handbook, putting provocateurs like Pederson into action. He was caught on video smashing store windows as the protests began, dressed in black with his wife’s respirator and an umbrella, protesters exposed him as he tried to retreat to his getaway vehicle. Pedersen and his cohorts’ job was to incite full-on riots to justify Trump calling in the National Guard, throwing red meat to his racist Confederate flag waving base. Always ready to sow confusion with a mixed message, Trump laughably claimed MAGAs love Black people. Because Trump cannot risk a military war with China yet, he needs a domestic anti-black, anti-immigrant class war to prepare the ground for possible suspension of the November elections. Why is this happening right now, and what must we do to fight it?
Why is this happening right now?
The suddenness and extremity of the current crisis compounding the pandemic, climate disruption and inevitable economic crash has created a situation where the ruling class is in a panic and without the normal solutions. The working class is divided, lacking leadership and facing mass unemployment (25%), while the ‘middle class’ of better paid workers and self employed are sliding rapidly into bankruptcy. Facing a crisis many times worse than the 1930s, global capitalism has reached its terminal crisis.
The contradiction between nature and capitalism is clear in the combination of the revolt of nature, signified by the zoonotic pandemic and meteorological cataclysms (fire, warming, mega monsoons, hurricanes, floods, tornadoes), the spontaneous uprisings of workers and oppressed against the moves of the ruling class towards populist Bonapartism and the capitalist class preparing the ground for fascism, the only way out for capital against the threat of socialist revolution. A new generation of multi-racial working class fighters need organization and theoretical armament to resolve the contradiction, stepping off the reformist ineffectual treadmill of electoral duality and the protest-only culture of the petty bourgeoisie!
How is this contradiction expressed in the U.S.A.? In the U.S., the contradiction is between the world hegemon and an economically advanced but politically backward working class benefitting from the imperialist extraction of super-profits from oil and other key resources and debt service. They have been shearing off the workers’ living standards since the 1970s and now the Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall has caught up with the U.S. capitalists as a class. Seventy years into the post-WW2 era, U.S. economic decline leaves the ruling class with few options other than the fascist road. One of these options is outright Bonapartist dictatorship. Since Trump’s election in 2016 he has sought to expand the presidential powers to become a Bonapartist ruler. The current compounded crisis leading up to the election pushes him faster in that direction, to take executive control of the other branches of government, asserting new powers and now attacking states’ rights.
The Bonapartist mobilizes right wing populism against the more timid and liberal wings of the bourgeoisie that are not otherwise willing to go along with the requirements of the biggest capitalists for authoritarian control and militarized solutions. Bonapartism and fascism share characteristics but are not the same. The Bonaparist leader will point to himself as the only force capable of solving the crisis and who does not hesitate to put the military on the streets for his own gain. The Bonapartist maintains a semblance of popular democracy, allowing the unions to exist and the voices of opposition to publish. The fascist follows when the Bonapartist cannot resolve the crisis in favor of capitalism, and when the workers movement challenges for power the fascist step in to crush the organizations of the workers and oppressed, crush civil liberties and round up, imprison or disappear opponents.
“From fascism the bourgeoisie demands a thorough job; once it has resorted to methods of civil war, it insists on having peace for a period of years. And the fascist agency, by utilizing the petty bourgeoisie as a battering ram, by overwhelming all obstacles in its path, does a thorough job. After fascism is victorious, finance capital directly and immediately gathers into its hands, as in a vise of steel, all the organs and institutions of sovereignty, the executive administrative, and educational powers of the state: the entire state apparatus together with the army, the municipalities, the universities, the schools, the press, the trade unions, and the co-operatives. When a state turns fascist, it does not mean only that the forms and methods of government are changed in accordance the patterns set by Mussolini — the changes in this sphere ultimately play a minor role — but it means first of all for the most part that the workers’ organizations are annihilated; that the proletariat is reduced to an amorphous state; and that a system of administration is created which penetrates deeply into the masses and which serves to frustrate the independent crystallization of the proletariat. Therein precisely is the gist of fascism….”
The COVID pandemic has compressed this contradiction explosively. The COVID threat to life forced a belated move to lockdowns, closing down the economy, creating millions of unemployed. The failure to control the virus has impacted the most exposed sections of society, impoverished workers, People of Color and immigrants. Trump, doing the bidding of the Chambers of Commerce, has constantly rejected workers’ right to life by demanding a ‘re-opening of the economy’ at the expense of their lives. The result was predictable and workers have resisted with over 200 strikes since early March. The threat of a mass movement against him has caused Trump to lose ground with his base over COVID; even Twitter is challenging him with fact checks; and he is threatening governors and mayors who stand up to him. Etc., etc.
Trump needs something to justify a state of emergency to force a re-opening of the economy and blame Blacks for resisting it. The imperialist playbook is to make other countries pay for your crisis, but in the end it’s workers and oppressed everywhere that pay. And so far he hasn’t broken the working masses. He knows that by targeting Black and migrant communities he divides the working class, gets the wavering elements of the ruling class fearful of mass anarchy behind him, and can use his power to impose martial rule and settle the question of who retains presidential power. At the same time he avoids the need for an external war with China which is a risk too far in the present global situation. The ‘red’ scare tactic is useful in winding up his white supremacist base as a fascist movement to attack the threat of workers revolution, but as yet there is no need to push this to the limit and risk a global war. With the executive power and support of Congress he has the room to retain power and prepare for the future fascist regime. The critical question is: can workers’ and oppressed mobilise and organise against that power and resolve the class war by taking power with a Workers’ Government and Workers’ State?
How to fight it!
Trapped between elections and protest the working class has no political self organization nor party that acts in its interests. Without an independent voice of the working class and oppressed the discussion dominated on the mainstream media ranges from Fox with its hypocritical stance of: “…yes you have something to be angry about but your going about it all wrong…” to the worthless Democrats looking for a way to channel all the righteous indignation off of the streets and into an “Anyone but Trump” Biden moment. The problem for the Democrats, and they know it, is that in many of the urban centers where daily police terror in the Black and Brown community is the norm, these cities are being gentrified by Democratic political machine politicians in league with billionaire developers. And the enforcement actions in response to this wave of protests triggered by the murder of George Floyd are also guided by Democratic administrations calling in the National Guard so they don’t look weak in face of Trump’s taunts and threat to send in the military police. Their big reason to show little opposition to Trump is their desperate need for budget bailout monies. They won’t get these if he doesn’t sign the bill granting them!
So the multi-racial working class and oppressed youth who filled the streets for the last week have no legitimate reason to support the Democrats other than the pragmatism that comes with fear, moral defeat and short sightedness. The fake socialists like Bernie Sanders and his followers in and around the fringes of the Democratic Party want your energy to put Biden in office because they do not believe the working class can take power into its own hands and are unwilling to chart a course to that end. They fear the youth uprising they wish to manipulate for their “new normal!”
It is significant that these demonstrations are racially integrated. Historically in America, major working class and social gains have been won for all when white workers have united with Black people and taken up the fight for Black rights. And the ruling class knows this! This prompts the sector of capital represented by Trump and Barr to consider a rapid turn to fascism, hoping to have adequate ‘Boogaloo’ (civil war) support for a ‘Fatto Compli.’ They are capable of self-delusion about their chances too, particularly because Trump surrounds himself with yes men. So we need to advance the historic program and organizational forms of the working class to disabuse the far right of their chances of carrying the coup off! We need to make the AFL-CIO organize “Federal” Locals of the unemployed open to all the unemployed! This would at a stroke signify a great unifying of the class as a militant labor movement. Demand living wages for all, employed and unemployed!
Revolutionary Marxism sees the youthful vigor expressed in the streets as incipient rebellion, as the voice of the voiceless manifests in desperate direct action. Desperate because all “legitimate” means of redress are like talking to the hand. All roads of reform are blocked by the economic desperation of a capitalist class facing its own demise due to the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. Their largesse, their noblesse oblige, allows only incremental changes made one day and taken back the next. Even the most peaceful leaders of the oppressed and workers are shot down and jailed while self serving opportunist leaders get way too chummy with the class enemy after convincing the masses they can ‘work it’ from the inside; only to turn on their base when the real master tells them to enforce austerity by force of arms. Reform and electoralism has failed to end exploitation of workers and the environment, has failed to end racism, bigotry, and misogyny and has resulted in one imperialist enforcer after another doing the capitalist class’s bidding overseas.
During the Obama years we saw the escalation of police murder of Black and Brown lives in cities under Democratic Party control. For the fake left, the political initiative is always in the hands of liberalism. This means the social revolt of the moment is of little importance and the principle of class political independence is either inapplicable or just another concept to fob off or put into historical storage! The solution offered by the liberals and fakers like the DSA, the Progressive International, the Working Families Party, et. al. is to get out the vote for Democrats without even putting a warning label on that deadly option.
A warning, would be in order, that it was Obama who shut down Occupy, uniting the FBI with local Democratic mayors and providing their police with military grade equipment and federal “intelligence” assistance to crush a movement which shut down the ports of Oakland, Portland and Longview, threatening the billionaires of Goldman Sachs where it hurts. It was Obama who assisted the coup leaders in Honduras to crush the mass movement, making it the murder capital of the world as union activists were hunted down in their homes and in the streets. It was Obama who funded the Zionist operation known as “Cast Lead” devastating Gaza. It was Obama who extended the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and kept Gitmo open. It requires a level of national chauvinism on the part of self-proclaimed revolutionaries (from Anarchist to pseudo-Marxist) to ignore the actual role of the Chief executive of U.S. imperialism and advocate election of his henchman Biden!
We also learned that spontaneous and sustained protests, even when they result in general strikes from below (as in Oakland when 40,000 shut down the port winning support from the most militant workers of the ILWU) are not enough to win. The Occupy was smashed by the Democrats who guided the masses back to the electoral arena. But even the reelection of Obama was not enough to keep the people off the streets. The racist institutionalized terror the capitalists need to keep Black, Brown and oppressed working class families down and powerless could not be dismantled by all the weary speechifying of Obama and the parading of AG Holder. And so Occupy was shut down but the movement morphed quickly, with the cell phone camera and social media exposing multiple racist cop and vigilante murders, into #BlackLivesMatter.
Ferguson erupted and national attention was transfixed on its racist legacy of slavery-the modern lynching by cops and neo-fascists. Youth, many of whom got their activist start in Occupy, enraged by the lack of progress, attacked symbols of the confederacy and the battles in the streets became national debates which exposed the rightists’ love of the heroes of the confederacy and the stars and bars as OVERT RACISM. When the fires of the Rodney King, Oscar Grant, Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd protests fade and the lawsuits commence, the liberal politicians always come out with endless proposals for police reform and citizens review boards that have not and cannot reform institutions of racist terror which the capitalist class relies upon to keep poor folk down.
There is a rapid shift today in the U.S. as racism becomes morphed into a fascist movement in support of Bonapartism. But already the compounded crisis has sparked an uprising that changes the objective situation, so that Bonapartism of the centre cannot hold. Witness how fascists protesting the lockdown and touting automatic weapons caused the Michigan state government to suspend its sessions for a week. This interference with government then escalates to the Governor of Minnesota sabotaging public order by calling out the National Guard, deploying them against the workers’ right to protest for the first time since Missouri deployed the Guard in Ferguson (2014). The fear of revolution expressed by Trump and the Democrats as “anarchy” could force Trump to move to fascism quickly, as his Bonapartism is a balancing act where neither class has the ascendancy. Bonapartism is a transitional form of class rule that cannot hold when the class war escalates, facing the compounded terminal crisis where we face the question of socialism or barbarism.
Trotsky saw fascism as on the agenda in the 1930’s, and even wondered out loud whether the U.S. could continue to afford bourgeois democracy. The outbreak of WW2 war substituted for it by finally stimulating full employment. Since then unions have been further incorporated into the state machine, the working class has become even more amorphous without a mass workers party, let alone a mass revolutionary workers party. The new left has retreated to part of the way with their latest LBJ. So the uprising today is an expression of class spontaneity without any independent working class voice. What little benefit it has from social media can be closed down with the flick of a switch. Even so this resistance makes the prospect of a Bonapartist class balance difficult, and demands a more reactionary solution. If we are right and Trump cannot risk a major war with China yet, how does he resolve the internal class war? Trump is capable of exploiting the crisis and making a turn to fascism if he is convinced this is the only or the preferred way to hold onto power. He has the backing of a sector of the ruling class to do so, and it is an open question how much of the military would support suspension of the Constitution, in whole or part.
Workers and oppressed need our own party with a program that answers today’s immediate needs with answers which only working class power can implement. Such a workers party will organize the entire working class united with the oppressed. The party will build class-political consciousness for the overthrow of the exploiters and their state. The workers’ own party will coordinate all the partial and democratic rights battles to achieve the goal of the conquest of political power by the workers and oppressed. We call this a transitional program. It is built in every struggle addressing each single need of the people with steps through self organization to the establishment of workers control of the means of production by democratic planning in the interest of all, not for profit.
How do we get from here to there? We begin this way:
We fight for justice for ALL! Remember all victims of racist terror! George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmed Arbery Presente!!
Mobilize the social power of the working class for political labor strikes demanding justice for George Floyd! Defund the cops! Not one penny for the forces of state repression!!
Cops are racist terrorists and strikebreakers! Kick the cops and prison guards out of our unions and labor federations!
Struggle against racism in our unions: build anti-racist class struggle caucuses that fight for political independence and a transitional program.
Build racially integrated, armed, trained and disciplined Labor/Black/Brown self-defense guards out of our union halls and community centers to defend Black and Brown people against racist cop, fascist and vigilante terror!
For mass labor-centered mobilizations to drive the racist terrorists and the fascist militias from the streets! Convene workers tribunals for justice for all victims of cop violence!
Charging Derek Chauvin with only third degree murder and manslaughter is a mockery of justice! Workers and oppressed will never find justice through the capitalist courts!
Cops, National Guard and Military off the streets! Hands off the demonstrators!
For Workers Political Strike Actions to Oppose State Repression and to Defend the Protests! Shut the Whole Country Down!
Free all arrested anti-racist protesters! Defend Samantha Shader! Drop all charges and release her now! An Injury to One is an Injury to All!
‘Antifa’ are not terrorists! Government hands off ‘Antifa’!
No to stop and frisk and racial profiling! Cops out of the schools and off of transit!
Racist police terror and violence will never end until American capitalism is abolished. For revolutionary integrationism! End discrimination in housing, jobs, edcuation and healthcare! For Black liberation through Socialist Revolution!
Build a fighting Workers/Labor Party and a Workers International a tribune of the workers and oppressed, to fight for a Workers Government! For workers rule and World Socialism!
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